He has worked at The New York Times since 1999, at first covering Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and after the 2001 attacks, the clean-up and recovery effort at Ground Zero. He is the co-author, with James Glanz, of City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center, a history of the towers, their conception, construction, life and destruction.

He previously worked at The Washington Post and The Hartford Courant, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism for a series of stories he co-wrote on the flaw in the Hubble Space Telescope.